Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

Fiction about Ravenloft or Gothic Earth
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jamesfirecat
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Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

Post by jamesfirecat »

AN: And here is where I'll be posting my author comments/getting feedback.

So, let's talk about language. To start with the title of sub story is French (or at least my best approximation of French which will apply to just about everything I say about languages other than English in these notes) for “To an evil rat, a good cat.” It's a play on a French phrase “à bon chat, bon rat” translating to “To a good cat, a good rat.” that is usually used to describe a meeting of two equals (two very skilled duelists for example). Fittingly given the warping of the phrase in this side story, La Grande Dame, and her peasant servant are anything but equals.

It also neatly sums Jacqueline's plans for James in one sentence, an evil rat will have the service of a good cat.

The name of James' village is quite obviously French for “Good Crepe”, a “joke” that probably only makes sense to me.

Thirdly, James' family name has nothing to do with cooking, it's actually French for “Paw”. Also during James' oath of loyalty it is worth pointing out that “rumor” “secret” and “scandal” are the terms used in Richemulot for copper, silver, and gold pieces respectfully, so it's actually a bit of clever word play where he is saying that neither deformation of her character nor bribery will make him betray her.

If you don't get Jacqueline's linguistic jujitsu at the end there its pretty simple. James' traditional motto as we've seen in the past is “Sic Semper Rattus” or “Thus Always to Rats”. When he says it, the “Thus” typically has an implicit meaning of “Death”.

Jacqueline's version translates as “Thus Always Loyal to Rats.” By inserting that one word she's turning it from a battle cry against rodents to a reflection of how James has pledged his devotion to the biggest most powerful (I'd say most evil but after reading Scholar of Decay Louise Renier seems to have her twin sister beat on that front or at is more conventionally cackling bitch sort of evil (granted since Jacqueline is in power right now she doesn't have to spend time figuring out evil schemes to seize what she has just how to keep it (on second thought near the end of the novel Louise reflects on how she once drowned a puppy as a young girl thereby giving her an unquestionable lead in the “who is more evil” race))) wererat in the entire domain, and he doesn't have a single clue.

I can't say with perfect certainty to how in character Jacqueline is being here but I think it's quite plausible. As mentioned previously, I've read Scholar of Decay which seems to be the biggest source of information in it much more sparse stuff in the box sets or even the Gazetteer on Richemulot (it's full of great stuff on Richemulot as a nation but unsurprisingly being written in universe goes more into Jacqueline's history than her psychology).

To touch on the stuff I was trying to reflect, despite her own chaotic nature, Jacqueline has a real love for control (early on in the book she chastises her son for giving into his inner rat and biting his tutor and talks about how he must not be like his father who lacked control) and if she wanted control of James, oh but does she have it.

She's willing to make reasonable trades (lets a scholar poke around in abandoned buildings in exchange for telling her what he finds, is willing to let said scholar rescue his brother from her cousins who were going to drown/eat him so long as he doesn't hurt them in the process) and bide her time.

It's pretty clear that given her monophobia (fear of being alone) she'd prefer to be a iron hand in a velvet glove style ruler (she'd rather be loved than feared, really really rather be loved), and it seems to be working for the most part.

I don't know if any other source portrays her as being audacious enough to admit to the wererat problem in Richemulot but in turn effectively suggest the Darklord of the domain is some evil head wererat down in the sewers, but given her force of personality, conniving mind, and popularity among the lower classes there's probably no reason that she couldn't pull it off to villagers who have only been to the capital once or twice in their lives.

In short, like many people of the “evil” alignment in D&D Jacqueline can be perfectly pleasant and charming company, so long as she is getting her way. Once she isn't... that's when she'll concoct elaborate revenge schemes that involve having you hunted through the city, mauled three quarters of the way to death and then eaten alive.

Also if setting up complicated plans to try and keep her son in power once she's dead (and thus won't personally benefit regardless of if he succeeds or not) seems overly maternal/selfless, just in keep in mind she's also doing it to spite Louise/all the other family members who figure her son Jacques won't last a week once his mother departs.

Anyway, to close this section on one last note about language, given that James' family name, and Jacqueline's plans to use him to dispose of wererats who earn her ire without him realizing the truth of the mater, I guess say makes him quite the Werecatspaw!

No need to bring out hooks and rotten produce ladies and gentlemen I'll see myself out.
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Re: Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

Post by jamesfirecat »

Bleeding Love Side Story Author Commentary: For those who are interested the title of this sub story comes from the song "Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis (you can hear it online as part of an amv here /watch?v=ViOaFFg9NuY) and it's just about the most perfect encapsulation of Mirri and James' relationship that I could possibly imagine. Give it a listen and see if you agree with me.

As for the monster that the two ends up fighting, it's a Red Widow. It's a monster that is unique to (or at least originates in) Ravenloft. It's basically a gigantic spider shapeshifter that seduces men, takes them someplace private, and then transforms into its true shape, that of a gigantic crimson arachnid. At that point since it was already holding its victims in its arms and now has a lot more (and a lot larger) arms to hold them steady a victim on his own unlikely to be able to get free so it will have no trouble biting them and injecting its poison.

Its bite alone is relatively harmless (d3 damage) but the poison is of the classic D&D save or screwed nature (save versus poison or your dead) obviously James did make that save though due in part to his arachnophobia he failed the horror check invoked by watching the Red Widow take its true form and went into mental shock (basically James' mind hit a Blue Screen of Death and needed some time to itself in order to restart properly).

If the victim is subdued then the Red Widow will either feast on their blood and body, or it will inject its young into the body at which point when they hatch they'll do a chest burster from aliens though at least the victim is "lucky" enough to already be dead by that point. All of this means that while the Red Widow is a horrifyingly (in several different senses of the word) successful ambush predator, it’s also completely unsuited for the task of fighting undead.

It's base bite damage is not going to break through Mirri's damage reduction, and if it did it would immediately get healed by Mirri's fast healing, and to reiterate something you'll probably see a number of times in these author notes... undead are immune to all poisons and diseases that were not created with them expressly in mind.

The Red Widow has six hit dice, thus why Mirri was able to kill it with three physical attacks, even leaving aside the physical trauma of her blows, her energy drain on its own (two negative levels each round if she can land a blow) would slay the Red Widow.
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Re: Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

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AN Howling at the Moon: I'm well aware that this is much shorter than James and Mirri's first meeting. I'm likewise aware that in point of fact this raises more questions than it answers. What did you really think I'd give away the true nature of Alexander Diamondclaw after only two books? Sorry people that's a secret I'm keeping very close to my chest indeed. Still enjoy your edge piece of the puzzle, and expect to get a few more of them as I continue expanding the Monster Party series.
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Re: Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

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AN for Side Story "Does that make me crazy?": To start with unless you have a strong stomach I would suggest against googling porphyria (do a yahoo search of it that'll be perfectly fine though (sarcasm)) since the pictures that go along with most descriptions of the disease are not pleasant to look at.

Suffice to say, it is a real life disease and also probably exists in Ravenloft, it has a great many symptoms that are most unpleasant to view or contemplate, though it's more likely to make a group of random peasants who see someone suffering from it think they have found a vampire than its victim itself become deluded into imagining they are a vampire. Still, if you're trying to convince an insane vampire that they're still alive, porphyria is probably the best route you can go.

The real name of "3d" is actually Doctor Dominiani /Dacluad Heinfroth, but I guess part of the nature /theme of this story was not using names very much so I decided not to name him in story.

This short story is based on the first of the Bleak House trilogy, and adventure called "Whom Fortune Would Destroy" with the unsaid half of the title being "she first makes mad." as writing by Publilius Syrus in Moral Saying's first century B. C. (at least according to the Ravenloft adventure book in question).

I personally prefer the Greek version of the saying (can't find particular person to attribute it to) "Those the gods would destroy, they first make great." which in my personal opinion is a PERFECT fit for Ravenloft since that the entire point of how the Dark Powers play with their darklords, making them "great" and powerful but denying them what they truly want most.

The adventure is interesting to read (well parts of it are interesting to read parts of it I felt an intense desire to skip over I'll get to that later) but I'm not sure how much fun it would be to actually play out. A lot of it rests on the principle of having the heroes get their back shoved against a bunch of no win situations and then having them be treated in a dehumanizing manner, while they have their minds ripped away from them. If Thoughts of Darkness is comparable to a bad drug trip where all your nightmares come alive and try to murder you, then Whom Fortune Would Destroy is best compared to 1984 or at least the tail end of the book mixed with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

It's adventures like Whom Fortune Would Destroy which give Ravenloft a reputation not as a land of Gothic horror but a land where you better make sure to bring a couple extra character sheets with you because whatever character you start out playing isn't likely to last through the adventure.

It includes a number of delightful ways for the villains to induce various kinds of insanity in the heroes from dissociative identity disorder (or "multiple personality disorder" for those who aren't keeping up with the latest version of the DSM (that's the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders") to particular phobias, to believing that you've had certain limbs amputated, to stealing your memories to... yeah you get the idea.

I'm not opposed to the idea of an adventure based around the heroes having less gear/less access to their normal equipment /tricks, you could have an interesting adventure where the characters need to go undercover as prisoner's (either with or without the guards knowing) in some prison either to find out some information another prisoner knows or rescue someone. The problem is that this adventure feels too... too mean to me.

I'll give an example of the level of mean that is present in this adventure as written. Take the prison adventure idea I mentioned above, it offers opportunities for heroes to be heroes, sneaking about gathering information, making deals between various factions of power in the prison, despite the fact that they are in a rough spot they are still masters of their own destiny and are able to rise above the standard riff raff in the prison and accomplish more by working together just like they would normally even if they don't have magical swords and armor/have had their spell components taken away.

Now, imagine that one of the situations in that set up involved the rules for detailing something decidedly unpleasant happening to one of them during a group shower. Good taste keeps me from saying more.

This adventure is THAT mean, except it's on a psychological level rather than physical.

I mean if any of your players have relatives who have suffered from long term debilitating mental illness... well it's likely that one of two things will happen; either they will cry, or they will stoically reach across the table and punch you right in the face.

The other big problem with the adventure is that a great deal of it plays out with the group not able to work together, they may not be put in the same cell (well the book as written say they are but if the villains were smarter they wouldn't put them all in the same cell), each one is going to be mentally tortured in a different way, even leaving aside the sensitive nature of what is going on, it's something between, awkward, unpleasant, and boring to either listen to something happening to someone else that is strictly out of character knowledge or spend a lot of the time listening to nothing because the DM only comes into talk with one person at a time.

I know I praised the Wolf Run situation back in the second Monster Party Book for splitting up the characters/ forcing each one to think on their own for how they would outrun werewolves, so why am I hating on that idea now?

Because the Wolf Run was a one time event to shake the characters up, here though, unless they are astoundingly lucky they are each going to have multiple sessions which are designed to induce various mental illnesses, and while being separated from your fellow players once in an adventure will make you feel frightened and alone, having it happen multiple times in the same adventure just makes you realize how much this is slowing down the game.

Also this adventure awkwardly bumps up against that old saw (or at least what I hope is an old saw) about how it isn't a DM's job to tell a PC how to play their character. Telling someone "okay you failed that will save, so now I want you to act like you've got a pathological fear small spaces for the rest of the adventure" is likely to make players cry fowl and I wouldn't entirely say that they're in the wrong.

Then there's the way it is written. I've seen a lot of stuff in Ravenloft designed to mess with the heroes, there's Thoughts of Darkness as I previously mentioned, this adventure, and then there's something that describes what I feel is the gold standard of how to play with the minds of your characters, The Nightmare Court book.

Why do I like the Nightmare Court approach? Because a lot of what it does gives an appropriate feeling of "less is more" with lots of room to play around with how a character's dreams are altered or messed with, and what sort of affects this can have on the character. Also there's something wonderfully mystical about dreams that can already inspire feeling of helplessness within us even in real life, for except for a few people who are lucid dreamers we are all prisoners of our subconscious minds when we dream, unable to do anything but try to wake up as events unfold which we may not understand and certainly do not control.

Not only that, but at the end of the day the Nightmare Court stuff had an appropriately uplifting system built into it. Every time that the evil villains used their powers against you to explicitly make things worse in your dreams, they were also weakening their hold over you, moving you one step closer to the point where you could actively drive them from your dreams.

Since the entire point of it is to make you repeat more or less the same dream several times in a row, it's possible to "fail forward" where so long as you are putting up a good fight and forcing the villains to expend their powers eventually you can reach a point where after say a month you are well stocked and ready to drive them off, so long as a failure is not fatal it makes you stronger, which is how RPGs are supposed to work in my opinion.

(Because of how much I like this system/its fluff expect to eventually see an 8 chapter Nightmare Court Novella getting posted as part of this 'story' a few bits at a time over the next few months)

In this adventure, the entire thing seems designed to create a downward spiral of inducing as many mental illnesses in the players as possible and each one makes the heroes less likely to escape, the villain gets to have things entirely his own way.

Not to forget that the way that he induces these mental illnesses... its almost disappointingly banal when you get right down to it.

You put someone in a room that is designed to have walls that can slide inward to make it grow smaller and smaller every time they take the measurements, yeah that's how you exacerbate any already existing traces of claustrophobia.

Put someone in a room then fill it with bugs, Insectophobia.

Put someone in a chair and then turn on a spell that causes pain whenever they leave the chair, that's how you instil a sense that doing ANYTHING is always the wrong choice and it's better to just catatonically lay there and do nothing.

It feels like insanity and messing with your characters minds is much better accomplished when done through metaphor and a certain amount of "magical tea party" or at the very least rules which are much different from standard rules, rather than just tossing great big "congratulations you now have a 75% chance of doing nothing each combat round" penalty at players.

Also now that I stop to think about it (a phrase I seem to be using a lot in these notes) I realize that this adventure has way too many "magical I win buttons" for the villain. That's almost not a metaphor, there are magical spells that will put everyone to sleep in some rooms for example, and obviously since the villain and his minions are vampires they are immune to it.

Ravenloft is supposed to be a low magic environment, that's something I try to reflect in my stories it's why Cal uses potions and Devi magical artifacts rather than either of them having any sort of magical powers. The only member of the group who can actually cast spells is Florence... who like any proper druid can be a force of nature unto herself when she cuts loose but due to her temperament it's not something she does very often. So yeah having easily reusable magical spells all over the place... that's just TOO explicitly magical for Ravenloft where magic tends to work through warping people (as in you know giving a werewolf or vampire extensions of the powers they already have like making Jacqueline's ability to cow rats as a wererat into mental influence on all rats within her domain) rather than giving the vampire a building that has a magical sleep aura installed.

To make things worse still, most Ravenloft adventures tend to be written with a certain amount of catharsis in mind at the end. You get attacked by killer puppets, have them take over your bodies while you're trapped as a puppet locked in wooden cages and soundly mocked about it in The Created, but it eventually leads to you getting to lock the head evil puppet inside a theater as its burned to the ground. You get constantly chased/hounded by werewolves throughout Dark of the Moon, but then at the very end you get to chase Gregor, possibly even overcoming his ability to control werewolves so you can use the curse he forced on you against him!

The bad guy, however powerful, however strong, should still suffer a fairly resounding defeat at the end of the adventure, even in Ravenloft.

In this adventure though, at the end the most the heroes can probably hope for is being able to run/sail away from the asylum and the island it is on having rescued Rudolph Van Richten, and hopefully not picked up too many new mental disorders in the process.

That in my opinion is a really shitty pay off for an adventure that puts the heroes through hell in a way that's worse than even the traditional Ravenloft adventure...

Before you say 'well it is a trilogy, you can't kill Darth Vader at the end of A New Hope' you should know that I feel it doesn't apply in this particular case. The villain of this adventure does not show up in either of the other two that make it up. Thus there's no reason why the adventure shouldn't have been written towards making sure he gets his oh so richly deserved comeuppance.

I could have written an entire book around this adventure in theory. It'd start with Alexander explaining to the group the fact that Rudolph Van Richten had supposedly checked himself into a mental asylum of his own free will, but two weeks after doing so was no longer in written contact with those he had been beforehand.

So the Weathermay twins of Mordent were hiring Alexander and the group to go and rescue him since Alexander presents himself as a great fan of the Doctor's work who is willing to accept only a small fortune in payment to risk his life in a situation that has proven too much for even Rudolph Van Richten to deal with.

Then of course Mirri complains, not because she feels upset over all the other vampires Rudolph van Richten has killed, but because she's afraid that he'll try to kill her at some point so naturally she'll need to kill him instead and then they won't get paid.

James meanwhile of course is all too happy to get a chance to finally meet the famous Rudolph Van Richten (either his usual impenetrable sense of optimism or the fact that Van Richten expressly mentions being friends with a werewfox at one point is keeping him from worrying over the fact that Van Richten doesn't have the most positive of opinions of lycanthropes) whose books he's all read.

The group goes there, get shipwrecked, gets 'rescued' by a bunch of cerebral vampires, group realize that they're all cerebral vampires (well vampires/undead of some sort) since Mirri can hear the fact that they lack a heart beat) so then a great big fight breaks out where Florence basically uses the fact that they're on a wooden ship to her advantage to start "breaking"/"remaking" the ship to stake vampires left right and center. The cerebral vampires get their coffins burnt/smashed destroyed and then their ashes pitched over the side of the ship into the ocean meaning even if they do come back to life they won't last very long.

Then they basically arrive at the asylum ready to kill anything without a heartbeat first and ask questions later so they start tearing the asylum apart one vampire at a time (the fact that vampires dress just like the insane prisoners doesn't help when Mirri's ears can tell one from another at a hundred paces) and eventually work their way up to the Doctor Dominiani who runs the place. The Doctor lacks any truly special combat abilities so eventually they defeat him and then its time to rescue Rudolph and go home.

That or we'll get to see how the famous sleep aura that gets used so liberally in the story isn't going to work on Mirri, or on Florence once she goes into plant mode and since Dominani's entire thing is mind affecting attacks for the most part, which don't work on vampires and won't work on plants... Mirri and Florence alone can go Alexander's Angels on his ass.

In fact if Dominani did some "experiments" on James and his previously mentioned fear of spiders... I think I know exactly how Mirri would respond...



Mirri: HOW DOES IT FEEL HAVING SOMEBODY F**K WITH YOUR HEAD? HOW DOES IT FEEL, YOU BASTARD?

So hey, comparatively he got off light.


I could have done all of that, but I decided not to because this adventure is so dark and mean that I wanted to cut to the end of it.

So I did exactly that and showed only the most importance/important parts.

In particular, the part where the darklord de jour gets exactly what he gets to coming to him.

In this particular case it starts with Mirri managing to drink his blood during a fight between him and the group. Once that's done, the kin-nectar rules are fully in effect, because when a vampire drinks another vampire's blood interesting things start happening.

It creates a mental link between the two vampires, and the one that did the drinking is allowed to give some "reasonable" mental commands to the one who got drunk from. In this case, obviously the command that Mirri is giving is "Follow Doctor's Orders" but at the same time she's also constantly projecting her thoughts/memories into Doctor Dominani's head.

Given that like most darklords he's not in possession of the most sane of minds to start with (in fact being half crazy is his curse isn't it?), it really isn't hard to imagine that Mirri could give him a Kin-Nectar induced case of schizophrenia, since after all, one of the main symptoms of that disease is someone hearing voices or seeing things that aren't really there. So drawn your own conclusions about what it would be like to have someone else projecting their thoughts into your mind, even if they aren't trying to control you, that would still be quite disconcerting and get in the way of you thinking clearly to say the least.

Then, after that, once he's been drunk from and temporarily passed out from blood loss, staked in the heart or otherwise incapacitated, you get Dominiani dressed up in one of his own dehumanizing full body robe and mask outfits, the kind he makes everyone (except himself) in the asylum wear.

Next step you go and do what he does to the patients, refer to him by cell number rather than by name and if he isn't insane by the time his treatment's starts he certainly will be by the end of it!

The "doctor" talking to him in this case is of course Cal, doing his very best (or worst as the case may be) Lamordian Doctor voice.

There is a reason why I hate/don't like to write accents. They're a pain to write, and they don't tend to add anything to the story, just the mental work of needing to decipher what a character is actually saying.

Still, I wanted to drive home the "stereotypical Germanic Interrogator/Doctor voice" in this particular situation so Cal is replacing all "Th"s with "Z"s and "W"s with "V"s (excusing his own name because his vanity prevents him from calling himself "Doctor Vright") because who wouldn't trust/take orders from a man who speaks like that?

Cerebral vampires are actually immune to sunlight, which is why Dominiani doesn't burst into flames when the sun light washes over him. On the other hand, they are still required to spend eight of every twenty four hours in their coffin.

So while the light doesn't kill him, Cal just keeps him trapped and talking until he "runs out the clock" and Doctor Dominiani has no choice but to go back to his coffin. In the adventure as written his coffin should simply be in his room, and actually rather easy to find, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and instead wrote the story with him having a coffin hidden in the sort of place which only a vampire would be able to get to without knocking a wall down, something all smart vampires with established homes should probably to do.

Needless to say, much like that saying about send a thief to catch a thief, if you want to track a vampire back to its coffin, you send another vampire.

At which point Mirri pulls the necessary materials from Devi's bag of holding which she'd been lent for the mission, and by 'necessary materials' I mean everything short of a bellows to help feed a fire.

So, having covered the coffin with some heavily flammable substances, she lights it on fire.

When a vampire has been reduced to resting in its coffin this typically means that it is all but completely helpless, and that can be a great time to cut off its head, stuff with holy wafers and so on and so forth.

For those interested the "perma kill" procedure for a cerebral vampire involves wrapping them up in a straight jacket before doing any of the above, but how the PCs could possible be expected to know that I have no idea.

So it's reflected in story that even Mirri who is the group's expert on undead doesn't quite know what you would need to do to make sure Dominiani never came back.

On the other hand though, while they're helpless this gives you a chance to destroy /defile (possible "refile" since a vampire's coffin is by default something of an unholy object isn't it?) the coffin because most vampires depend on their coffin to sleep in for survival every bit as much as they do having blood (or cerebral fluid in Doctor Dominiani's case) to drink.

Vampires can sometimes come back to unlife after being burnt to a pile of ashes by having blood poured on them, but you're going to need a "wish" spell (something in my version of Ravenloft you have to be mage roughly on par with Azalin to cast) to bring a vampire's coffin back form being a pile of ashes, and Cerebral vampires are described as needing to sleep in EXACTLY the coffin they were buried in, so without that coffin, as I read the rules they're doomed to "die" again with 24 hours of coming back to life since there is no way they can sleep in that coffin, that coffin doesn't exist anymore.

As for Mirri, she lacks this particular weakness (needing a coffin) in part because she instead has the weakness of not being able to automatically return to a coffin to recuperate if seriously injured, something I mentioned back in the first book's commentary.

Also she is immune to that weakness because it is part of the nature of the curse the dark powers laid on her that I'll go into in another side story (the one which reveals how and why she became a vampire). Suffice to say for now, Mirri is, and always has been a more mobile type of vampire than most, which is reflected in both her strengths and weaknesses.
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Re: Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

Post by jamesfirecat »

Author's Notes Novella 1 Chapter 1: The Chesh-Dire Cat's scream is about as close as I can get to transcribing one of these...
properly.

Also some of you may be thinking “wait a moment... this doesn't really sound/read like Ravenloft, this reads like an entirely different fictional setting/novel that I won't be so crass as to name at the moment.

You are correct that this “novella” /series of chapters (it's going to be 8/9 or so long so too short to give it a “book” unto itself (also there are other reasons that I don't want to mention at the moment since they would give away some of my plans for the plot) and I may update it once a month at most) is unlike just about all of my other works, not directly based on an adventure from another Ravneloft book. HOWEVER I am still creating an adventure/story that takes place inside Ravenloft and this adventure itself is heavily inspired by Ravenloft source material, the “hows” and “whys” will become more and more clear as other chapters come out. For now you simply need to know is that yes I have a plan and I know what I”m doing.
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Re: Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

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AN Monster Party Novella 1 Chapter 2: The conversation about the pronunciation of “Sanguine Queen” is complete nonsense, even by the measure of a lot of the other stuff said in this and the previous chapter.

Alice being from Mordent is speaking Mordentish the low form of which is completely equivalent to real world French (or at least that's the theme I've been running with through all my Ravenloft works). So “Sanguine Queen” would be something more like “Reine sanguine” according to google translate. Thus, there shouldn't even be a rhyme possible, there only is because we're reading the character's speaking French automatically translated into English. It's like that joke in Going postal about “the gods being concerned with prophets not profits” which is near incomprehensible to those hearing it when said aloud, but perfectly obvious to the readers.

In English “sanguine” is pronounced so that it rhymes with “pin” rather than “Queen” but, what can I say it fit far too well for me to turn down the chance. Also time for another game of vocabulary word of the day, if you don't know what “sanguine” even means, it has two distinct definitions, the first is basically “cheerful”, “optimistic”, you know the way that James normally acts. The second definition is “bloody” you can guess which definition applies.

Also yes this book Is still taking place in Ravenloft, and is very much inspired by some Ravenloft related materials... though of course it's also inspired by some other works of fiction that I'm still not going to name, because by this point you really have already figured it out by now.

That said the Sanguine Queen has reason to be upset given how frequently people, even beside Alice believe she's exactly the same as the Queen of Hearts.

Also are you starting to pick up on a certain theme of how this particular story is unfolding, then you should probably be able to guess, exactly who/what the Silver Rabbit will end up reminding you folks of. If you haven't picked up yet... well trust me it will be every bit as outrageous as the first two chapters....
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Re: Monster Party Side Stories Commentary.

Post by jamesfirecat »

AN: Hopefully this adds a little richness to the Monster Party story it was designed to augment.

Originally I planned to have the results of reading Mirri's mind be the magical/mental equivalent of a dial-tone (I'm sorry the brain you've dialed is not currently working, please check back at another time...) but then decided against it.

It was much more fun/interesting to instead have Sudji encounter the equivalent of a the sort of eldritch abomination that man (or doppelganger) was not meant to know.

In this case my particular spiritual jumping off point was Giygas' style of speech during your fight with him in Earth Bound. I'm not sure if that's the right way to go about it, but the end result is to suggest that if you spend too long trying to read an undead mind not only will you not learn anything, but you're likely to need to start taking Madness Checks before long.

As for what he finds inside Alexander's mind. Well it brings to mind a line of Batman's from the Justice League Cartoon series: "My brain's not a nice place to be."

Feel free to come up with whatever you theories you want on why his thoughts as Sudji read them up sounding like a parody of the Space Wolf fluff (every other word is "wolf" or variations on it).

For more examples of the difference between lying and storytelling, take note of how when James asks how "Inspector Logan" (actually a doppelganger other than Sudji) how he got his scar, the doppelganger is promptly left flabbergasted.

There's a very good reason for this, Sudji may or may not have spent enough time around the inspector to have mind read him to the point of knowing how he got the scar before killing, but this other doppelganger certainly never got told that information, because on the face of it, it's utterly unimportant to the task of impersonating the Inspector that night next to things like where he lives, and details of his current life.

He can't tell a simple lie that James will automatically believe based on reading on James' mind and telling him what he expects to hear, so instead he's forced to come up with an awkward half excuse of not wanting to talk about it at the moment.

Likewise back in the mortician's place, because Cal is concocting excuses for the implausible nature of James and Alex as a wolf and cat team, he weaves them into a story that he can think of no possible reason for Inspector Logan to be able to completely disprove.

Sudji can read Cal's mind, he can know that Cal is lying, he can know exactly why Cal is lying, but because Cal's lie comes with a caveat of "I can think of no possible reason for him to know with perfect certainty I am lying." Sudji is left without grounds upon which to call Cal on his bullshit.

In short, the doppelgangers ability to deceive is in a great many ways painfully dependent upon their mind reading skill. On the other hand, why would they have ever learned to lie in the particular style that Call/humans use, when they come from a society of telepaths? Needless to say, once the group dons their rings of mind shielding it has unpleasant consequences for Roja and the rest of his clan.

Also if you didn't know it yet, yes "The Flickerflame" is the "official" doppelganger title for Mr. S/the Darklord of Paridon due to his body constantly changing from one shape to another.
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